Ex-Saint Deuce McAllister set to assist Gulf region in Hurricane Isaac's wake like he did after Katrina

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The caller from the Gulf Coast stared Hurricane Isaac in the eye and refused to blink, bracing himself for an unsettling day ahead.
"It's raining pretty hard, and it's blowing pretty fierce," Deuce McAllister said late Tuesday night as he hunkered down inside a Gulfport, Miss., hotel lobby. "It's a big storm. But believe me, I've seen worse."

For a second or two, McAllister and I allowed ourselves an ironic chuckle at the absurdity of his understatement. Seven years ago, when he was a star running back for the Saints and I was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, we spent two days in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina touring evacuation shelters in Mississippi and bearing vivid and surreal witness to the flooded devastation of New Orleans.

That was how we met – experiencing the worst natural disaster in U.S. history with up-close-and-personal clarity – and in the years since neither of us has come close to forgetting the destruction, displacement and emotion we encountered amid the wreckage. It takes only a few, sentence-fragment-length prompts to stir the memories: The shell-shocked survivors squatting irrationally in otherwise abandoned high-rises above the floodwaters; the evacuee-laced airport scene McAllister likened to "Hotel Rwanda"; the large truck on the interstate speeding toward downtown New Orleans loaded up with coffins.